I opened up Spotlight, typed '12*' to do some multiplication and it's been frozen for the last 20 minutes.

I am looking for how to restart the program/service/whatever it technically is, but it's not in the Force Quit menu, so what is the quickest way to kill this process without restarting my computer? (I am on Mac OS X Snow Leopard)

Damon, why you accepted an answer that didn't work for you? I for one just got the exact same issue for the first time, tried the exact same measures, including from your comments below, and then tried every suggestion in the answers but still got nothing. It's still frozen there. Did you ever solve this without a reboot? :P
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CawasApr 12 '11 at 1:16

so you tried all that terminal junk and no dice?
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DamonApr 12 '11 at 1:42

the terminal junk is the same as the activity monitor junk, just like Wilersh said himself. and yep, no dices there. Spotlight is now behaving weird and I do think it triggered the issue but now I know it is actually the task/notification bar that's locked. My clock has stopped and the colorful hourglass is all over every regular mac icon there.
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CawasApr 12 '11 at 1:46

7 Answers
7

Actually, I just got the same issue (as I was saying on the comments) and it's not Spotlight that's frozen. It is the Menubar. Just like with spotlight, we simply have to kill it so it will be restarted by launchd.

It'll probably show up in /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app. Select All Processes in the toolbar to see processes of all users.

The screenshot is from when I was searching something. I guess you'd kill mds by pressing Cmd-Opt-Q after selecting it to terminate Spotlight, but I'm not sure -- probably best if you checked CPU usage and/or if the name of a process is written in red, indicating it froze.

odd.. as soon as I force-quite it, it appears back there and my spotlight menu is still up working away at nothing.
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DamonJan 10 '11 at 22:22

1

@Damon It's a server intended to run all the time, and gets restarted once you stop it. If it were responsible for the issue, killing it would fix it. Have you tried looking for another task, that maybe uses much CPU, or maybe tried to simply restart Finder?
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Daniel Beck♦Jan 10 '11 at 22:24

restarting finder was the first thing i did.. nothing else really doing much other than Window Server.. looks like i'm just going to have to reboot
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DamonJan 10 '11 at 22:54

For the record, just had this issue but I couldn't get terminal or activity monitor to work. The solution? Use Apple+Option+esc to bring up the Force Quit Applications dialog, select the trouble app, then click the "force quit" button.

06-19-14 I had a Spotlight-created, seemingly frozen dialog box describing an Evernote note with 0KB. I logged off, then logged back in. The dialog box disappeared. Did not need to reboot. Spotlight itself continued to function normally even though the previous "hit" was still stuck on the Desktop screen.